How To Get Two Docks in Mac OS X

If one Mac OS X Dock is great, is more than one fantastic? Find out with Dock-It!

Love it or hate it, the Mac OS X Dock makes it easy for us to keep favorite applications a click away at all times. But what if you want several docks for different tasks, or the ability to customize them in ways that Apple might frown upon? That’s where a handy shareware application called Dock-It comes in.

What You Need

1. Buy and Install Dock-It

Barrett Strong crooned, “the best things in life are free” in his 1959 classic “Money (That’s What I Want),” but where software is concerned, you get what you pay for. In the case of Dock-It, the cost of admission is a mere $10; download the latest version at GideonSoftworks.com and drag the Dock-It icon to your Applications folder, then double-click to open. If you want to try before you buy, click Buy Later to get the clock rolling on a 14-day free trial period.

Developer Gideon Softworks gives a generous 14-day trial of Dock-It before you buy.

2. Add a New Dock

By default, the new dock appears at the right center of your screen, populated with mounted disks, a Home folder and Clock and Preference Applets. The first icon houses Dock-It controls; click and a contextual menu pops up with display preferences. To add a second Dock-it dock (for a grand total of three), select “Edit Docks” from this menu, then click the “+” button at lower left of the window sidebar. Double-click the new “Favorites Dock” to rename it and press Return to commit the change. Clicking the “-“ button with any dock selected will remove it from your screen (as well as the sidebar). Note that only two Dock-it dock can be visible at a time.

3. Configure Dock Settings

Dock-It settings include three tabs: Contents, Settings and Advanced. You can quickly add any drive, folder, or file to a dock by selecting “Add File/Folder” from the Add menu at top, browsing to your desired selection and clicking Open. To arrange tiles on your dock, click and hold on a selection in the Contents pane to move it higher or lower. The Settings tab controls how and where your dock is displayed. You can choose six different icon sizes and position docks on the top, bottom, left or right of the screen, or move it to a different display entirely, if one is available. Other options include floating docks above other windows, showing a contextual menu when a volume or folder is clicked (rather than having it open in the Finder), and turning automatic dock hiding on or off.

Complete control of your docks, all within Dock-It’s Settings tab.

4. Add Applets to Your Docks

One major advantage of Dock-It over OS X’s Dock is the addition of five “applets” for getting things done quickly, organized in the Contents tab. Applets include Clipping (clipboard for image and text), Mail Clipboard (one-click emailing of clipboard contents) and Shelf, best described as a queue for files you want to copy or move — handy for gathering files from different folders into one place.

Use the blue “Add” gear to insert a Shelf Applet, which creates a blank tile in the dock. Drag a source file onto this tile, navigate to the destination folder, then drag the icon back out of the dock and drop it in the new location. (To move the file instead of copying, hold down the Command key as you drag and drop.) Create as many Shelf tiles as your dock has space for — once used, they’ll remain empty for next time.

A Shelf Applet lets you temporarily store files in a dock to easily find them again for a copy or move.

5. Customize Your Dock

Last but not least, customize each dock to make it your own. Click on the Advanced tab to adjust background or border color and transparency. By default, new docks have a thin white border — eliminate this by sliding the Dock Border Transparency all the way to the left. Select Dock Image > Choose from the Settings tab, then browse for an image file to plaster your own face on the dock control icon.

Dock-It’s Advanced tab allows you customize the look and feel of each dock.